Deacon stood still for a long moment, taking in his new surroundings that were vastly different compared to Floor One's.
The fog hugged the forest – thick, heavy, and constantly moving – obscuring all sight beyond a certain distance. Trees stood tall over Deacon, reminding him of the trees that surrounded the cabin he used to live in with his father.
Every step he took produced a muffled noise: crunched roots and leaves no longer made the noise they were supposed to, wet moss no longer made that squelching noise when stepping atop it. It was not because he was some sort of master assassin, thief, or had any skill in the footwork that any of them used, rather, he assumed it to be some sort of effect of the fog that encompassed the forest.
It had been around five minutes since his arrival on Floor Two, yet he hadn't moved more than a dozen feet from where it left him; dead center of a hill-lumpy clearing strewn with twisted trees and rocky outcroppings.
"Well, I can't do anything if I just stay here worrying about what the fog could do to me if I jump into it," Deacon muttered as he exhaled through his nose, before bending his knees and launching himself upwards, catching a thick tree branch high above him.
From the height he stood at, the forest appeared to be stretching for kilometers on end before disappearing into an ocean of fog. The canopy rippled with the movement of unseen birds, or beasts pretending to be birds, but he didn't bother squinting to make them out due to the influence of the fog.
Instead, he pulled out his Status Page from one of his pouches.
Swiping through the main section of his Status Page, he moved onto the Party tab.
It was distorted.
Flickering lines twisted around it like static interference, the data warping as he tapped it open. He saw the names Jass and Esmerelda, but not their coordinates nor the compass that should have been under their names. Just two slowly pulsing green bars under the section of Vitals beneath their names.
"It's a Solo Floor," he muttered under his breath. He remembered this from Sam whispering to him the answer back during an exam they had under Instructor Voss's tutelage back in the Academy.
When the Floor is a Solo one, it itself enforces isolation, to where even party tracking was reduced to nothing, and you would be locked into some sort of separate portion of the Floor where you were expected to complete all on your lonesome.
While Solo Floors were rare within the Tower, the quests they gave were "fair" depending on your Class, relatively speaking.
He tapped over to the Quest Log, his eyes scanning the updated Floor information once more.
Floor Two – Unbinding Fate:
The Cursed Forest of Moriah is a forest that has been cursed by a long-forgotten witch who sought to escape the eyes of fate. Somewhere deep within lie the statues of the Three Fates: Urd, Lachesis, and Morta. Only by finding them and appeasing their judgment can one escape the forest.
But the Fates demand payment. No corruption may walk their grove. Every monster, every cursed beast, must be slaughtered. Their blood feeds the forest – until it doesn't. All who enter are tested by illusions, beasts, and despair.
Floor Completion Criteria:
▸ Locate the Three Fates' Statues.
▸ Offer the Vials.
▸ Survive successive waves of hostile entities within the Cursed Forest.
Time remaining: — ∞ —
He let out a long and slow breath as he finished reading his new Floor Quest.
Thankfully, unlike Floor One, this Floor Setting was one he'd learned about from Floor Logs within the Academy Archives.
This was a basic search and slaughter archetype in which all he had to do was walk in the direction he faced when he was spawned in, and while heading in that direction, he would eventually find himself in the heart of the forest, all the while killing everything in his path.
From there, he would then face waves of beasts, and in their battle, their blood would soak the area around the Three Fates' Statues, which would then, hopefully, complete the quest.
The only special thing he knew about this type of archetype was from what he learned from studying numerous Floor Logs within the Academy Archives was that the reward you would receive from completing a Solo Floor is heavily influenced by the number of waves you selected to face when "Challenging Fate".
The tree branch sagged under Deacon's boots, letting out a low creak before it sprang back as he launched himself forward towards the next branch. He darted through the thick fog like some kinda phantom, bounding across the tree branches high above the forest floor.
These trees in the cursed forest were huge, thickly coated in all kinds of moss and slime, and gnarlier than anything he'd ever laid eyes on back when he used to live in a cabin deep in the woods with his Father.
Every leap he made, traveling from branch to branch, was near silent, his gaze snapping left and right, scoping out the next sturdy spot to land or if any creature would leap out onto him from the fog all around him. Down below, the Cursed Forest of Moriah was a lively silhouette free-for-all, teeming with shapes moving in the gloom.
Shapes moved beneath the canopy Deacon was atop of; some crawling, others loping, and a few slithering in ways that didn't match any beast he'd ever studied.
However, they didn't make any move against him. Not yet, at the very least.
Seemingly only stopping short to taste his scent through the fog as though he were some sort of free cologne sampling station in a mall.
As he traveled within the Cursed Forest of Moriah, the air around him was thick with the scent of damp moss and wet fur, while the ambient mana around him felt both ancient and heavy. The leaves that drifted through the fog looked to him like fireflies as they faintly lit up the area around them as they spiraled downward. Behind the veil of white around him, various creatures let out a low, wet exhaling and growls.
Eager to devour his flesh.
Deacon paused, crouched on a limb wide enough to park a car on. He sent a bit of mana into Mycelial Grasp and felt the slight twitch of tendrils tightening around the hilt of the dagger in his hand.
A rustling noise came from his right.
He pivoted without hesitation, feet anchoring, spine rotating, and ducked as a pale, eyeless creature burst from the fog. Its limbs were too long and far too many. He let it overshoot, then he drove his dagger upward as it passed, sinking the blade into its underbelly. Spores burst from within the bird's innards as a dagger dug into its liver.
And so it begins, Deacon mused.
The creature spasmed before going faint on his dagger
*[Wood Sparrow Lv 2] has been slain – XP has been given.*
Deacon didn't watch as he let it plummet to the ground with a flick of his dagger, as he was already moving, leaping from branch to branch, smooth and swift.
Due to his self-proclaimed Phd in tree-hopping, a skill that he learned while hunting with his father, his boots would find purchase in places where most would have slipped.
The second silhouette, looking a tad humanoid-ish with its forearms, leaped at him from above.
Deacon twisted his body mid-air, grabbing the creature's forearm with one hand, and stabbed it clean through the throat with the other, letting it fall into the fog below him without any care.
He didn't stop moving.
The fog seemed to wrap itself closer around him, covering more of his vision, the closer he was getting to the heart of the forest.
Every few leaps he made, Deacon would see more and more movement in the fog, hulking silhouettes of flesh and scale brushing past trees, bone-thin creatures stalking low in the underbrush, bloodshot eyes blinking at him from within the fog.
But none of the creatures' silhouettes that he identified as strong pursued him. Only the weak, low-level ones did.
What? Why are there even Level 12's in here? Those aren't supposed to show until Floor Four…
A trickle of unease moved down his spine at his own thoughts, and he dropped suddenly to avoid a cluster of spiked vines that had arched like a scorpion's tail from a nearby limb. They hissed softly, retracting with twitching movements as though disappointed.
He rolled, caught another branch, and launched himself forward again. Higher this time.
Me and my big, blabbing mind, Deacon mentally berated himself. Unwilling to verbally break the silence of the forest at least until he was able to see beyond five meters in front of him.
Another leap. Another gust of mist rushed past him, chill and wet, clinging to his skin like sweat. Deacon moved without hesitation, vaulting over a crooked outcrop of tree limbs.
He landed on a wide, sloping bough and crouched low, muscles coiled tight. Then, for some reason unknown to him, motion exploded beneath him.
A scream, low and guttural, warped by distance and something definitely not reproduceable by a human, broke out behind him, and in response, the creatures below surged.
Dozens of them.
Deacon didn't hesitate. He snapped forward into motion, launching himself again as a blur of limbs and chitinous hide burst from the fog beneath him, jaws wide. A spiked tongue snapped through the air, nearly catching his boot, but he rolled midair, flipped, and drove his heel into its exposed snout on the way down.
The beast's skull crunched, bone shattering as it was driven into a jagged trunk below. Spores vented from the Mycelial Grasp as Deacon landed, already cutting the next monstrosity that lunged from a higher perch.
Its blood sprayed across the branch, crimson and steaming.
*[Fleshwing Stalker - Elite Lv 2] has been slain – XP has been given.*
*[Gnarl-Tooth Larva Lv 3] has been slain – XP has been given.*
A branch snapped underfoot – not his own.
Deacon pivoted, dagger drawn, crouching into the shadows. A massive silhouette approached from the treeline to the left; it was bipedal, with long arms dragging bone hooks behind it. Its skin was wrong. Half bark, half muscle. Hollow holes where eyes should be. Its mouth opened vertically, unfolding like petals of meat.
[Ent Lv 8]
He tensed as it neared him, his left hand reaching for a short sword.
But the Ent paused two meters away from him and sniffed the air.
Then it turned and walked away.
The fuck? Deacon thought as he suddenly found himself once more alone in the fog, watching the back of the Ent vanish into the fog.
Deacon remained crouched for a full ten seconds after the Ent vanished into the mist.
Every instinct screamed that he had to be caught in some kind of illusion, cast by the Ent to kill him through poison or proxy. But nothing happened, even after he drew his short sword and nicked himself. On Lower Floors such as this Floor, most poisons and illusions could be broken with a bit of pain, unless an Artifact was involved.
The forest returned to its distorted silence, save for the whisper of mist curling along the trees and the tickling of voices around the edges of the fog.
He straightened, jaw tight, and took a tentative step forward.
Then another, swapping from his dagger to his dual short swords.
Then, as he got closer to the heart of the forest, the fog thickened once again.
Somewhere deep ahead, something… called to him, pushing him to go west.
The hell?
He wasn't sure how to describe it other than that he just… knew which direction the voice was coming from.
The heart of the forest wasn't far now.
He was certain of it.
Below him, he could see movement, a lot of it.
A massive beast looking like some sort of hybrid between a T-Rex and a Bear with too many legs and skin that split with each step, crawled through the muck, gnashing jagged bone-teeth together..
Its breath steamed, and the scent it released was rancid.
Deacon didn't slow himself; instead, he dropped from the bough above, driving both blades into the monster's spine. Mycelial Grasp's vines wrapped themselves around the hilts of his short swords, oozing out thick along their blades as they tore through the beast's innards before he twisted the blades free.
*[Carrion Splitjaw Lv 4] has been slain – XP has been given.*
The corpse slumped, steaming against the roots. Deacon didn't stay to watch it dissolve into the floor's corruption. He launched back upward, disappearing into the canopy again.
Suddenly, a thought came to him. Would using my flames as a torch improve how far I could see?